opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr

Ooh boy. This took a while.

There is a built in Greek keyboard on the eeePC Xandros distro. Just as well, given that Xandros is named after X Windows and the Greek island of Andros. (There’s a Bahaman island of Andros too: who knew…)

The built in Greek keyboard was not difficult to install; and it even came with a polytonic mode. I activated the polytonic mode. Graves, circumflexes, iota subscripts, all OK.

No breathings.

Now that’s odd, especially as noone seemed to have reported that particular problem. I tried to install Simos Xenitellis’ update to the Greek keyboard. That went worse: the keyboard file was not even recognised by Xandros. I then embarked on, I dunno, four or five hours of config file roulette, until I got things working. Herewith the summary.

1. The first polytonic keyboard for Linux used dead keys for smooth and rough breathings (psili and dasia): they arbitrarily picked horn and ogonek as the smooth and rough breathing dead keys.
2. This was a hack, and intervened with non–Greek-locale use of these Vietnamese and Polish diacritics; so they were corrected in later releases to the backspacing diacritics U0313 and U0314
3. which later still were recorrected to U10000313 and U10000314.
4. … Overall, the keyboard has been unstable over the years.
5. I didn’t find Xenitellis’ post on the keyboard not working—which surprises me; but though it may have given me some hints earlier than I worked them out, I don’t think it would have solved things.
6. The built in keyboard and mapping (/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/gr, and /usr/share/X11/locale/el_GR.UTF-8/Compose or /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose) had U+0313 and U+0314 as the dead keys for breathings. Xandros was treating these strictly as backspacing diacritics, so typing them before the vowel as dead keys had no effect.
7. Xenitellis’ update defined the new dead keys dead_psili and dead_dasia. Xandros ignored these. Presumably the new dead key definitions haven’t been compiled into Xandros.
8. The old hacks dead_horn and dead_ogonek are still in the composition tables. But switching the keyboard to use these is utterly ignored too.
9. The eventual solution for me was to grab two other arbitrary dead keys, which were already defined for Latin alphabet keyboards, and were likelier to be recognised than horn and ogonek. I went for caron and cedilla.
10. I then globally replaced U+0313 or dead_psili or dead_horn or whatever I got up to in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/gr (the original, not Xenitellis’) with dead_caron, and dead_ogonek with dead_cedilla
11. And I did likewise in the keyboard mapping file: /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose, not /usr/share/X11/locale/el_GR.UTF-8/Compose , because I had not successfully convinced the eeePC it was in downtown Salonica.
12. Things then worked. With that familiar sinking feeling of spending five hours to get something working that should have taken five seconds.
13. In playing config roulette, I enabled Multi-Key symbol composition, which I had only vaguely heard about twenty years ago, but which I wouldn’t mind making my friend. Multi-keys worked fine with Latin characters, but were ignored for Greek characters, even after I studied up on custom keyboards and told the keyboard file that key <MENU> { [ Multi_key ] }; (“THE MENU KEY IS THE MULTI-KEY DAMMIT!”) Pity, I liked the multi-key mappings…
14. Caron is used with Greek consonants in Greek dialectology by some practitioners. (So κ̌αι or κ̑αι [tʃe, tɕe] for Standard Greek και [ce].) If I want to transcribe Greek dialect in Greek script, though, I think I might switch over to the Mac…)

It became apparent that the out-of-the-box “easy” desktop that comes with the eeePC was concealing stuff from me. The text editor for starters. It was clear that if I was to do anything more than click and drool, I should get access to the full desktop. Not that there’s anything wrong with click and drool. In fact, I think any real use I put the eeePC to will be pretty click and drool. But that should be my choice, not the manufacturer’s.

Decent instructions on the eeePC wiki again. There is a manual way of installing the full desktop, or an “easy” way, and a “wizard” way. Who wants to wade through command line crap, right? So I opted for the, uh, command line easiness of an installer script through the community server at tuxfamily.org. The wiki did note that the Easy (and, it turns out, the Wizard) solutions depend on the community server. But we’re all online, the community server address browsed through to a file listing, all would be fine, right?

Well, I don’t know if it was the time of day or denial of service or me having cursed tuxedo-wearing penguins once too often or what, but no, it was not fine. The server may have been responsive in a browser window; but from the command line, the installers kept timing out, halfway through downloading 6KB files. Because command lines makes me monomanic (and it’s a good thing I no longer program), I kept at it for a couple of hours, including trying to patch up the installation by running installation updates (and getting the same timeouts)—before I just gave up and ran the scary Manual install. Which was just two more command line commands, to a server that actually responded (it was the company server, it probably had a bit more networking budgetted), and I was in KDE in five minutes.

Oh well. I appreciate the sentiment from the community, anyway.

Next up, going online with a netbook. At home, not a problem. The home wireless has gone perversely slow and erratic since I hooked up with it on the eeePC; I’m trusting the eeePC does not expel daemons onto the wireless router, but who can tell, it’s Linux.

The University of Melbourne, bless its corporate socks, will not settle for WEP password-only authentication over wireless. They quite reasonably would like to know who the hell is logging on to their network as well; so they use WPA authentication.

This is beyond the eeePC as it comes out of the box.

Instead, one follows the instructions on the eeePC wiki, as inspired by a posting on the eeePC forum, to install a completely different wireless driver, which does know what WPA authentication is. A note to the Long Tail: read the original forum posting, as well as the wiki. After you spelunk into the config file and create the new connection in text, you can’t just find the network and log into it, after “Create a wpa_supplicant.conf_MINE for your secure network.”. As the top post of the source posting thread says, you actually have to create a dummy connection without hooking it to anything; then, spelunk into the dummy connection’s config file, and set its driver manually to be the new wireless driver you’ve installed (up wpa_supplicant -B -iath0 -Dmadwifi -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf). You then connect online via the dummy connection.

The wiki makes it look that all that is a complex rigmarole for preserving your existing WEP and open connections under the new arrangements (Create a New Network Configuration). You need to create a new configuration to log on at all, so you can’t just tune out this step. Don’t bother preserving your old connections by doing this though, and just hook up to them from scratch.

When it came to hooking up to MelbUni in particular, no advice was posted from tech support (would they even acknowledge Linux eeePCs exist?), and Google ended up taking me to a posting on the Whirlpool forum. I always thought Whirlpool is where people complained about their home ISPs (it’s how I decided on my current provider); but MelbUni is an ISP too, I suppose. The posting gives just the Network part of the config file; you’ll need to get the rest from somewhere else, and the example configuration that comes with the new wireless driver (/usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/examples/) is not it. Take the example configuration from the eeePC wiki. The Whirlpool posting says either a hashed or literal connection name will do, but the hash didn’t work for me; the literal connection was fine.

… But PLAINTEXT password? PLAINTEXT?!! What sort of a joke operating system forces you to enter into your config file a PLAINTEXT PASSWORD?! (No aspersion on the Whirlpool poster, who was suitably embarrassed about this; at least I got online eventually thanks to him.)

Sitting on the floor outside the duty free shop, oh so long ago (two weeks ago, in fact), I paid my £4 wireless access to find out whether a Linux eeePC could network with a Mac. Instead, I found that a Linux eeePC could be transmogrified into a Mac, with what seemed like not much more than an afternoon’s surgery. Enthused at the prospect, and at how cheap the machine was going for, I surrendered my plastic to the man.

Well, in principle, sure you can Macintoshify your eeePC. It voids the warranty, and Apple will be really unhappy with you, though I doubt they can imprison you. If they do try to imprison you, the little trick the hackintoshers do, of putting an Apple sticker on the eeePC (so it can qualify as “Apple-labelled hardware”) may not be completely compelling to their lawyers. But, let’s momentarily continue on this hypothetical.

If you have a 901 or a 1000 eeePC, Gregory Cohen has some très slick bootdisks that actually let you install OSX Leopard right off your generic 10.5 system disc. (Not the disc that comes with a new computer: they’re always loaded with model-specific stuff that will not talk to another Mac model, let alone an “Apple-labelled hardware, end scare quote”.) The bootdisks come with some BIOS tweaks to the eeePC that are apparently needed to improve performance, and let the thing boot up in 20 seconds as opposed to 7 minutes. Something to do with DSDT and ACPI (fooling the machine’s enrgy saving mode into thinking the machine is still an eeePC and not a Frankenstein, or something like that); and if I wanted to know about BIOS, I would’ve gotten an XP netbook and been done with it. My Linux–non-hating colleague at work blanched when I mentioned BIOS…

… but I didn’t get that far. First, I realised that no slick BIOS patch for the 900 model was forthcoming. Then, I realised it was just as well none was forthcoming. The 900 has an earlier chip than the 901, one that Leopard was not compiled for. Moreover, Leopard is a dead loss for the 4+16 GB flash drives: it is problematic at best to get a 4 GB drive to accommodate Leopard, and the 16 GB drive will be too slow to be usable. This meant there’d be no installing straight off the Apple discs for this model: the BIOS patch would not have helped. I don’t know if the difference in chip is why there’s no patch, I just curse and move on.

The slick patch and native installation from Gregory Cohen promised just about everything would work smoothly—even wireless; the one sacrifice of functionality seemed to be the webcam, and that seemed a reasonable price to pay. With the new state of affairs, I was back to the altogether spelunkingier universe of Tiger installation. (Even the brave soul who first installed Leopard on an eeePC ended up reverting to Tiger.) Tiger installation means torrenting a hacked version of the OS, to make it chip and size compatible.

Doing without the native chip also means sacrificing a *lot* of functionality: the “What’s Working” [and What Isn’t Yet] section of the Tiger eeePC wiki cheerfully noted I’d be doing without webcam, Ethernet, Sleep, audio in, audio out (unless I had a Bluetooth headset—and I wasn’t getting one for this), a clock that wasn’t undergoing Time Dilation by a factor of 2.5, and I’d have to buy a new wireless card to get anywhere. On eBay, because the shops don’t sell Dell offcuts. And all this, with half the already pathetic battery life, because OSX chews up the cycles.

So I’d be going from an unfamiliar OS which makes it impossible to add anything new, but at least the packaged software did some stuff, to a familiar OS where half the familiar software wouldn’t do anything, I’d have to go begging for a Dell offcut to get online with a *netbook*, and I’d have no end of flakiness and asymptotic functionality to look forward to.

I salute the people who have Macintoshified their eeePCs. Seriously, thank you for your pains, and great show. But I won’t be joining their number.

… So it’s Linux. Mpf.

Loyal readers, I take this opportunity to ignore you completely, and address myself to the Long Tail of Teh Google. I will resume normal frivolities shortly, and will flag these abnormal posts as [GEEK].

I have just come into possession of an eeePC, as regular readers will know­­—after a protracted period of temptation. I’m typing this post on the eeePC now, although I’m not sure how much of a habit that will become. I’m addressing myself to the Long Tail, in the expectation that others like me will have bought an eeePC, and googled to find what the hell they do now.

The eeePC was astoundingly cheap at Duty Free in Heathrow; and there were several good reasons why it was cheap:

1. It’s an eeePC 900 Straight, a newly discontinued model.
2. It was the last one in the shop.
3. It was the demo model in the shop.
4. They had the wrong charger with it—which is why I had to wait another couple of weeks until I could juice it up again.
5. The battery life is pretty ordinary: it’s the default 2.5 hours (because this is basically a 7 inch eeePC driving a 9 inch screen).
6. It has no hard disk as I’ve known it: 4 GB solid state drive, 16 GB solid state hard disk.
7. It has Linux on it instead of Windows.

Now, you’ll recall that I was determined not to contaminate my home environs with Windows, outside of careful OSX emulation twice a year. Linux, though? I mean, have they got it working yet as a Real OS? Well, depends on how demanding you are. The paucity of software is far less of an issue now that we’ve all lurched onto the Cloud. The graphical interface is acceptable. But it is still Linux, as I found; and you are not really insulated from the dreaded config file, and the Russian Roulette of putting in random configurations, to see what happens. At which, I cannot but exclaim:

Screw you and your anorak-wearing evangelism, and get back to me when your GUI Preferences menus actually do something useful.

There, that feels better already. I mean, OK, for day to day stuff it’s close to acceptable, I do have to admit. But changing this box’s state in any way is more painful than it needs to be; and what it needs to be is not very far north of zero. I don’t have the time, the patience, the inclination, or the Biblical extent of longevity needed to go spelunking.

Right? Well, let’s see what I tried to do.